“He waas here.” Chuck still worked talking through his wired-shut jaw.
“I’ll bet that went well. You wanted to kill him?”
“We’re all dead anyway. Juust a matter of time.”
Sally frowned. “Chuck!”
“I wasn’t trying to kill him.” He was getting his annunciation down. “I wanted everybody to know how fragile we are. Big Mark needed to stop playing the hero.”
“There’s only 137 of us up here. Everyone counts. Everyone should be the hero.”
“Pshaw.”
“Don’t screw around like that again. It could’ve been serious.” Sally gave Chuck a chilling disappointed gaze and departed.
Chuck put his VR headset back on with the muted noise cancelling earbuds. He tried to slow his racing thoughts. It was no use. He had visions of forests, waterfalls, snowcapped mountains, and the historic Space Needle of his birthplace: Washington State. He remembered camping, academic achievement, and yearning for adventure. He remembered the thrill of being picked to come to the moon and the rush in his gut when he first laid eyes on his fiancé, Mia. He remembered the disgust at being introduced to the walking recruiting poster that was Captain Mark Martelli.
This is wrong. Chuck regarded the idea that the base could use the lunar regolith and AI — artificial intelligence prototype processing reactors to make everything as madness. There used to be three schools of thought on the state of the earth. One, a huge part of the earth was spared but it was not the US and Western Europe. Two, many survived around the world but were reduced to a primitive state. And three, the damage killed all but insects and deep sea creatures. Now there was only one school of thought. Chuck talked to Doctor Ezekiel Ben-Ami just before pulling shift at the control panel, just before knowing which school of thought was right.
The first school of thought proved wrong the first week after the incident. If China survived, then Japan would’ve survived. They all knew from communications with the Japanese moon base — Japan Station — that they were just as stranded as the U.S. moon base — Moon Base Armstrong. There was no communication with earth — absolutely nothing — since the incident. And, as far as China was concerned, they didn’t even know if its moon base was shielded enough to survive its certain exposure.
The second school of thought also proved wrong. If any human survived it would’ve been by using technologically advanced shielding technology. If they used technology to survive, one of the first things they would’ve done was communicate with their moon base. Chuck waited like everyone, hoping against hope.
The only explanation, no matter the persistent hope, was that little life survived. One look during earthrise at the mottled orange surface of the once pristine beautiful blue marble should have been enough. You could see it was a corpse, not a living planet. After his visit to the University Pod, Chuck knew the earth was dead.
He also knew using Moon Base Armstrong as a Noah’s Ark to reconstitute humanity was hope over logic. There was an international base on Mars but Moon Base Armstrong never communicated with it and Doctor Ben-Ami did think it was shielded. By all accounts they were alone up here with Japan Station at Shackleton Crater.
What was left for Moon Base Armstrong? The only thing we can do is die with dignity, Chuck concluded. It’s either that or we’ll be choosing who lives and dies. We’ll be savages, cannibals, and die just the same; swimming in our own excrement. He sighed.
Now I’ve got to wait six weeks for my jaw to heal. He turned on his VR headset and queued up the entire Breaking Bad television series. I must figure out a way to end this charade with dignity. The first episode of the high school chemistry teacher turned methamphetamine drug dealer distracted him from further morbid thoughts.
5
Sally reeled from one crisis to the next. The incessant chaotic firefighting absorbed her twelve-hour shift. The director, whenever she showed up, refused to dive into the excruciating detail that determined Moon Base Armstrong’s day to day survival. And it was day to day. There wasn’t a shift that Sally didn’t wonder if a catastrophe would end it all. She wanted to hand the shift responsibility off to someone — anyone else. The shine and adulation of being in charge was long gone; replaced with foreboding, doubts, and unremitting fatigue.
She’d no sooner returned to the control panel after seeing Chuck, when Sally saw a bank of red alarm lights. She lifted her equipment harness from her chair and gasped seeing five missed urgent calls on her contactor — the moon base equivalent of the terrestrial smartphone. Chuck was right. I didn’t follow the protocol and use my head set when I rushed out to get Mark. Always-on communication was a prime directive and was critical for the Shift Manager. She clipped on her ear bud, scanned the missed calls, and punched the icon of the most recent.
The Manufacturing Pod Manager, Jerome Papadopoulos — Jerry, answered. “Sally, where the hell are you? We’ve got an air leak.”
She blanched. “Where?” Of urgent problems, none was more terrifying.
“On segment three of the Prototype, I mean, Manufacturing Pod.” The pod was originally set up, when Jerry took charge, to test prototype samples. The idea was to see what things the AI controlled tools could manufacture and use that learning in the next phase of expansion. After the incident, expansion requiring rockets from earth was off the table. Now the exotic 3D printers and tooling they brought for prototypes would have to do much more.
A week ago, the director renamed Prototype Pod the Manufacturing Pod and gave it the task to produce the parts needed to make Moon Base Armstrong self-sustaining. The Manufacturing Pod was making parts on a daily basis. The parts it produced were critical for survival.
Sally clipped on her equipment harness and bounded out of the control room. “How bad is it?” she asked through her ear piece.
“We closed all hatches and the rate of fall is sixty millitorr per second.”
Sally worked her brain as she moved to the Manufacturing Pod. Sixty millitorr per second — how much time does that give us? There’s 760 Torr at atmosphere, which we call green pressure, and we can function till we get to 523 Torr so… 60 millitorr per second drops 237 Torr in… 3,950 seconds. There was a reason NASA picked Sally for this mission and one was she could do lifesaving calculations in her head. We have sixty-six minutes. “We have an hour to stop this leak Jerry.”
“We don’t know where it is.”
Sally arrived by going through the double locks that separated the pods from the hub — the Nexus. The double locks were to prevent more precious atmosphere from escaping a leaking pod. There was a threshold beyond which air and oxygen production couldn’t recover. Going below that threshold would kill all in Moon Base Armstrong. She sized up the situation and noted Jerry and two others, James Staid and Gitanjali Chatterjee — Jim and Gitty — were in the pod.
Jerry bounded to Sally. He displayed visible relief that someone of higher rank had shown up. “We’re getting the steam going.”
Sally remembered how, on earth, she would dip her bicycle inner tube in water to check for a leak. Here, Jerry’s team was using visible water vapor. Rather than bubbles they were looking for places that sucked in the vapor. Sally bounded to segment three. “Why do you think the leak’s in this area?”
“We heard the hiss,” Gitty was the one who answered.
Sally looked at Gitty and thought, in a different time and place, the exotic looking woman would be a model or movie star. Now she was, like Sally, in the middle of numbing day to day life or death chaos.